And the Walls Went Tumbling Up
by Scribbler
Summary: [one shot] A clone and a thief cross paths in an abandoned military base. They both want the same thing: the secrets buried in the lab there. Unfortunately, they have to go through each other to get them...


Disclaimer – Theirs, not mine.

A/N – Written in response to InterNutter's _'Love the One You're With' Challenge_. Discarded because it refused to fit the criteria to be eligible. Posted because it's cluttering my computer anyway, so I might as well do something with it.

Feedback – Always and forever.

_And the Walls Went Tumbling Up_ by Scribbler

October 2004

She could smell the old fear coating this place. It oozed under doors and around corners. With it came such other delicacies as stale sweat, dried tears and... something else. Something acrid and pungent. She paused, raising her head and trying to figure out what such a strange scent was doing in an abandoned military compound.

Stupid X-Men. If she'd had the words, or seen the need to use them, she might have cussed them all to high heaven. Stupid X-Men. Stupid weaklings. Stupid Wolverine. And again, twofold – stupid Wolverine. Had it not been for him, she would never have agreed to this. But there was certain magnetism when he asked for her help – not commanded, not insisted, but asked.

She knew what it was like to have unanswered questions about your existence. And she knew all too well what it was like to court danger in trying to retrieve them. When the enemy holds all the aces, your own deck is all but useless. It amazed her Xavier had allowed him to contact her for the job, let alone suggested it.

More importantly, she told herself, she still owed Wolverine for that thing with Fury. It was only thanks to his lies and the X-Men's hacking skills that she'd been wiped from memory and several influential computer files. She was a ghost now, thanks to them. And once this was over, she could forget they existed and go back to being a ghost.

She pressed her back against a wall and scented. The coast was clear, so she darted into view of the defunct surveillance cameras, sticking to the deepest recesses of shadow out of habit.

The corridor still reeked of that peculiar gas those unknown mutants had released. They were after the same prize as her, and seemed about as ruthless in their approach to getting it as she. Her tussle with the big hairy one had left him with a wounded shoulder and her with blood on her claws, but it hadn't put either side off. Whatever secrets lay hidden in this base, they meant enough to risk more than a few flesh wounds.

She didn't _think_ the gas was poison. Then again, her system would have stopped the effects anyway, so it was difficult to tell, but she thought it might be some kind of hormone discharge, perhaps intended to dull her senses or make her fear them. The sacs that one mutant pressed to release it had been on his throat, so it was entirely possible.

She felt the displacement of air before she heard anything, so when the figure dropped from the ceiling she was already moving into a counter strike. She kept her claws sheathed, then cursed her new emerging conscience for it, but the stranger had already jumped away out of her reach. She shifted position, spreading her feet to allow a quick dash in any direction without allowing an opening to be knocked to the floor. First law of combat: if you were down, you were finished.

Yet instead of attacking her, the stranger whistled: a low noise of admiration. She narrowed her eyes, but didn't bother wishing the brute she'd fought earlier hadn't torn off her mask. Wishes were for fools and civilians. They had no place in a fight. If her identity proved a problem... well, the X-Men need never know of just _one _body left out in the snow.

"Somehow, I was expectin' that Wolverine guy," the stranger said in a husky alto. Male, she deduced from pitch and silhouette. Tall, but not exceptionally so. Wiry more than strong – perhaps with some sort of gymnastic training, if body shape was anything to go by. Most of him was covered in a heavy duster, but she could see enough to try and formulate the best method to bring him down.

He canted his head to one side. Red pupils on black irises. Another mutant. She clenched her fists, ready to pop her claws if he proved a member of that same group she'd found here.

"Whoa, whoa, pretty girl. Ain't no need for dat." He raised his palms in the universal gesture for supplication. Then he grinned.

The scent of him was musk, dirt, sweat, a little whisky from a few days ago, old cigarettes, lightly ionised oxygen and... that unplaceable scent from earlier. If he'd been expecting Wolverine, then there wasn't a chance of him surprising the old guy. He was the odour equivalent of a large print book.

She kept her fists and defences raised.

"Way I see it," he said nonchalantly, "we both be on de same side, you an' me."

She raised an eyebrow.

"I mean it. I ain't no friend to dem." He nodded down the corridor, apparently in the direction of the rival group. "Gambit is here as an independent body. Information can fetch a pretty price, cherie. Especially de right _kind_ of information. Est-ce que je se faisant suis compris?"

She recognised French, even if she didn't understand it. Modern languages had never been a significant part of her 'education'. The rapacious grin did little to endear the stranger – Gambit – to her.

"I've heard of you," she said, breaking her silence. If he was who he said he was, then by her estimation there would be few to miss him. His track record with the X-Men wasn't exactly sparkling: worked for Magneto, turned up a few times being a nuisance, then kidnapped the one called Rogue, took her halfway across the country and shamelessly manipulated her to his own ends. Wolverine already wanted a piece of him for that one.

Gambit's head tilted to the other side. "Good t'ings, I hope? Okay, okay, not such good t'ings den. You can put de fists down, cherie."

She ignored him.

"So... we gonna do dis Mexican standoff routine all day? 'Cause, way I see it, while we here, anyone could be gettin' to dat lab below de basements an 'makin' off wit' de grand prize. Hm?" He raised his eyebrows as if to say, _You **did **know about that place, didn't you?_

She shifted her feet. She wasn't given to idle threats. She could probably kill him and be on her way within thirty seconds. What stopped her was a tiny voice in the very back of her mind that told her she wasn't a machine, and that killing wasn't the only way to deal with problems. Irritatingly, it sounded a lot like Wolverine.

"Or," Gambit went on, spreading his palms wide and leaving his chest open, "we could be, y'know, gettin' to know each other a little more. If I makin' myself clear. Eh, cherie?" His eyes seemed to blaze, and for a brief second she experienced what seemed like a shift in her centre of gravity. She righted herself and growled at him.

"I don't know what you just did, but if you do it again I'll cut your hands off and use them to strangle you."

"Quite de action girl, eh? Regular little Lara Croft. Now why you be wantin' to hurt Gambit? He not done nuttin' to you. In fact, he been downright decent – nice, even. Don't you wanna be nice back?" Again, his eyes blazed. And again, her centre of gravity moved.

She gritted her teeth and shouted at the voice in her head to shut up. This punk was asking for it.

He moved forward, reddish energy welling around his eyes and spilling down his cheeks. He droned on, telling her how nice he was, and how pretty she was, and for several seconds she faded right out of reality. She must have done, because the next thing she knew he was right in her face and her back was against the wall. His scent was strong in her nostrils, his eyes impossibly large in her field of vision.

"You want to help Gambit, don't you? You want him to be happy, and he be happy if you help him..."

His left hand rose to cup her face, and for the life of her she couldn't bring herself to stop him. Indeed, she actually wanted him to touch her, which was a new experience in and of itself. As a rule she hated physical contact. It made her feel trapped, and she'd sooner skewer a hand than take it.

"Demoiselle peu belle," Gambit murmured in bastardised French. "Il est gentil regarder vous. Je pourrais vous observer pendant des heures."

Energy dribbled down his face from his eyes. She watched it, felt her mind growing fuggy, and way back in her dustiest synapses she connected the dots that said the two were linked. Although all information she'd absorbed said this Gambit character manipulated potential into kinetic energy, it wasn't unheard of to have more than one mutant ability. Just look at that Jean Grey girl.

_Empathic abilities, _said a voice in her head, and this time it sounded more like Deborah Risman than Wolverine. E_motional manipulation – probably through eye to eye contact. Maybe even has something to do with the sound of his voice. Maybe some form of hypnotism._

Gambit's left hand had trailed lower and was cupping her jaw-line. His thumb brushed the corner of her mouth. When her lips hung a little slackly, the hand went lower still, alighting on the outline of her breast through her bodysuit and _squeezing_. The other came to rest on her right hip, then travelled around to sit between her backside and the wall. And still he talked and looked at her with those blazing mutant eyes...

She was not your average human. She wasn't even your average mutant. She had disciplines at her disposal that could not be taught and learned, but which were achievable only through a life of hardship and incessant training. She was not a telepath, but those who had trained her knew of telepathy and made her know accordant defences. So it was that her mind was streamlined in more than one form; her thoughts supported by a bedrock of ironclad self-control.

A self-control that, nevertheless, had allowed intense emotion to slip through before.

As it did now.

Outrage spiked her veins. Her drooping eyelids shot open in the same second as she buried a fist in Gambit's midriff. The whoosh of air from his mouth was satisfying, as was the crack of his jawbone when she spun into a roundhouse and knocked him clean against the opposite wall.

Her thoughts were still fuggy, but she already felt better.

"Ow..." Gambit was on his feet, but his lower jaw hung as slack as her own had done mere moment before.

The places where he had touched her burned, and she scowled because she didn't understand why the pit of her belly felt so... odd. Almost like hunger, but not quite. An odd sort of hunger that had nothing to do with food...

_Irrelevant_, her instincts told her. _Fight now. Think later._

_But don't kill the guy,_ said the Wolverine-voice. _Killing ain't always the best way to go. Learnin' that's the first step you gotta take to heal what they did to you. _

"Gambit t'inks you are not going to play by de rules," Gambit said with great difficulty. Was there no way of shutting this cretin up? He pulled a bo from his coat and extended it, twirling with ease like some street performer inviting spare change.

She permitted herself the smallest of smiles. Then she raised a fist, knuckles towards him.

SNIKT

Gambit blinked. "Aw... horseshit."

FINIS.


End file.
